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Tynt Insight Is Watching You Cut and Paste
jerryasher writes "In recent weeks I've noticed that when I copy and paste text from Wired and other websites, the pasted text has had the URL of the original website appended to it. Cool, and utterly annoying, and how do I make that stop? Tynt Insight is a piece of Javascript that sends what you copy to Tynt's webservers and adds the backlinks. Tynt calls that a service for the site owner, many people call that a privacy invasion. Worse, there are some reports that it sends not just what you copy, but everything you select. And Tynt provides no opt outs. Not cookie-based, not IP-based, but stop-it-you-creeps-angry-phone-call-based. It ain't a pure useful service, and it ain't a pure privacy invasion. But I sure wish they'd go away or have had the decency never to start up in the first place. I block it on Firefox with Ghostery."
We're not a big company, and I can tell you I'm the only Tynt guy commenting here. Derek
As a poster above mentioned, allowing 2nd level domains is a good trade off between security and convenience. Before I used NoScript I blocked external scripts using a proxy filter for years, and it's only been in the past couple that I've bothered whitelisting anything. Basically, a few APIs (e.g. Google's) and some oddly configured sites that use multiple 1st level domains are about it. Other than those, it is quite rare for a script from an external host to be something that is beneficial for the user. Usually they're ads, stat counters, or something flashy and annoying. This will get you into trouble with some shopping sites though, like Pizza Hut's where I wasn't sure if my order was placed or not, and didn't want to refresh and possible order another pizza. So I whitelisted "https://*", and that seems to work well.